Design by Giugiaro

No one cooks snails like the French, and no one designs beautiful automobiles like the Italians. Where the magic happens is in Turin, an industrial town at the northwestern edge of Italy, at the foot of the Alps. It is there that the great automotive-styling companies such as Pininfarina, Ghia and Bertone create the heart-stopping looks of the Ferraris, Maseratis, Lamborghinis and a host of other, non-Italian marques that have become our universal objects of desire. Within this congregation of elite industrial artists, there is one who stands so far above the others in creativity, output and world-wide influence that he is referred to by a single word. It is a word that other artistic circles reserve for rarities such as Horowitz and Picasso. The word: maestro. Giorgetto Giugiaro is his name. He's a reserved 50-year-old son of a Piedmontese church artist (he was helping papà with frescoes before he was a teenager) who 21 years ago cofounded (with Aldo Mantovani) the inordinately successful company called Italdesign. He has often been called the greatest designer since the death of another Italian, a guy named Leonardo da Vinci. That may not be altogether as hyperbolic as it sounds. If Da Vinci were alive today, he would doubtless be designing the most significant objects of the era--cars. And probably washing machines and hair driers and cameras and bikes and TV sets and sunglasses, too. For the record, Giugiaro designs shavers for Philips, TV sets for Sony, cameras for Nikon, motorcycles for Suzuki, watches for Seiko, bottles for Martini & Rossi, tennis rackets for Maxima and, yes (Italians will be Italians), a new shape of pasta for the Neapolitan company Voiello. As for automobiles, he has created such luscious, slippery beauties as the De Tomaso Competizione and Mangusta; the Maserati Ghibli, Bora, Merak, Quattroporte and Boomerang; the Alfetta GT/GTV; the BMW M1; the Isuzu Impulse and I-Mark; the Lotus Esprit; and the gorgeous, though star-crossed, De Lorean DMC 12.

Presumably, any top designer can create a beautiful car costing, say, $100,000-plus. What sets Giugiaro apart from the other Turin carrozzieri and what makes him the darling of high-volume, profitminded manufacturers are the names that sell in the hundreds of thousands or millions of units: Volkswagen Rabbit, Dasher and Scirocco; Fiat Panda, Croma and Uno; Alfasud; Lancia Delta and Prisma; Audi 80; Saab 9000; SEAT Ibiza; Renault 19 and 21. With the Hyundai line (Stellar, Presto, Pony Excel), Giugiaro initiated an entire automobile industry in South Korea.

According to the latest figures, more than 20,000,000 units of cars by Giugiaro have been sold. No other member of the design club comes even close to that. Companies that manufacture them acknowledge that he has fathered 69 automobiles in his extraordinarily fertile career; the true figure may be twice as high. Manufacturers are often too proud to admit they have sought outside help, and Italdesign remains faithful to the industrial omertà specified in contracts of this sort.

If there is one fact that separates Giugiaro from the field, it is his disconcerting habit of following logic when inspiration would be easier. Indeed, his fellow Italians call him "The Prussian," for his cool northern manner. Giugiaro has thought long and hard about his trade, and he has little use for fast solutions or flash. If he were ever to stick tail fins, spoilers or space-age gadgets on a design, they would be there to serve a purpose, not because some marketing genius thought they would be sexy.

"I believe a car should be the image of rationality," he says. "Designing a car has become a fact of life, because cars have entered our lives so deeply. If you consider what the automobile did to the world, I think it is the most important revolution of our lives."

What Giugiaro calls his philosophy of space leads him to discourse earnestly about automobiles as "boxes [or containers] in motion." So thorough is his dedication to rationality that when he undertakes a new design, he thinks not only about the passengers who will ride in the car but about the workers who will build it, as well. When he first presented his nifty little Panda utility car--the modern European answer to the Ford Model A--the Fiat executives who had ordered it were startled by door-hinge covers that stuck out like Alfred E. Neuman's ears. The appearance was shocking at first, but it was pure Giugiaro: Protruding hinges were much easier for assembly-line workers to install than the traditional hidden ones, and cheaper, too. They stayed.

American manufacturers, weighed down by their in-house, committee-style design philosophy and assumptions of superiority, have hardly deigned to grant diplomatic recognition to Giugiaro and Italdesign. Apart from the De Lorean (American only in its company's founder and its sales market) and the research and design and interior styling for the Mercury Capri, Giugiaro's sole Stateside design was the AMC Eagle Premier--and that was when AMC was owned by Renault. Detroit, apparently, harbors deep suspicions about the maestro. The feeling is mutual.

"American cars horrify me," he said a few years back, when he wasn't in a particularly diplomatic mood. "They're huge and opulent and gaudy, but there's no room in them. When I'm in New York, I feel nervous in taxis, because they're five meters long but I'm still squished up against the driver."

When he spoke with Playboy not long ago, he was more circumspect, but the underlying sentiments were unmistakably the same.

"Americans have been changing a lot in the past few years. Their cars are more rational now than ten years ago, but I feel that from the point of view of mechanics, American cars are not as technically advanced as they look. For example, you have some big sedans--very low, very sleek--that give you the impression of a very fast car, but their top speed is maybe a little bit more than one hundred miles per hour. So the appeal is not related to what you find in the product. And American cars, in comparison with European ones, are less roomy for the same over-all dimensions."

Giugiaro is somewhat more charitable toward Japan--he is quick to praise its automakers' excellence in detail--but he also sees the same American addiction to sleek, racy machines in which comfort and roominess are sacrificed to style. The belch-fire habit dies hard.

The burgeoning sales of Hyundais, Rabbits, Pandas and Unos unquestionably demonstrate that Giugiaro's boxes-in-motion philosophy can find enough buyers to make manufacturers who treat their public like adults prosper. It was before any of these cars were born, though, that he made his definitive statement on the subject. It was 1976, and the occasion was "the taxi project."

In response to an invitation from New York's Museum of Modern Art, he designed, built and brought to the U.S. a running prototype of what looked like a big yellow toy. The Giugiaro taxi was just over 13 feet long, six feet high and narrower than any New York cab--but immensely bigger and more comfortable inside; it had more passenger space than a Mercedes 600 limousine. Giugiaro's little gem was so intelligent, so practical, so right that it ought to have become a world standard. Instead, an absurd thicket of protectionist practices, local safety codes and conflicting regulations ensured from the start that it would never go into production anywhere. Even today, all other taxis--including the famous London cabs--look like awkward impostors in comparison with the big yellow toy.

Not surprisingly, as Giugiaro operates at the peak of his powers, he faces the problem that comes in the wake of all great success: too much work and not (text concluded on page 182)Design by Giugiaro(continued from page 106) enough of himself to go around. There are currently 330 employees on the Italdesign payroll (ranging from engineers and mechanics to modelmakers, electricians, saddlers and other handcraftsmen), but the maestro still remains firmly in control of the over-all concept; he insists on being personally responsible for every new model delivered to his clients. No doubt it is this hands-on attention that makes the difference between an ordinary car and an Italdesign model. The ancient Italian traditions of artisan handwork are evident everywhere around the Italdesign shop: No one pounds metal or shapes wood as well as the Turin coachbuilders do. Computers in Giugiaro's shop are for engineering studies only; styling springs from his head, not from microprocessors.

On the engineering side, Giugiaro's partner and cofounder of Italdesign, Mantovani, handles the calculations and techniques that not only turn the maestro's ideas into running prototypes but also design the dies and machinery and manufacturing processes to mass-produce them. For the first Hyundai Pony, in 1975, Italdesign delivered the car (minus the motor) and the assembly line for building it. They're not kidding when they call it a fully integrated consulting company.

The tremendous demand for his services has led Giugiaro to found two sister firms: Giugiaro Design, for nonautomotive product design, and Giugiaro SpA, for men's fashion. Want shoes, neckties, socks or jackets with a distinctive touch? You can get Giugiaro models now. As for general industry, the output of Giugiaro Design is so vast that it would take most of the space of this article merely to list it all, as evidenced by the diverse products--from bicycles to yachts--presented in this feature. The maestro was not above creating a new urinal for a Spanish company named Roca, but he drew the line when an Italian company requested a line of funeral accessories. Designer coffins? Too much. Basta!